Top Englishman Quotes

Favorite Englishman Quotes

1. "An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed."Author: A. J. Liebling

2. "While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race."Author: Adolf Hitler

3. "The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely Greek nor Portugese nor Spanish, nor South American. What did seem highly unlikely was that he was an Englishman called Robinson."Author: Agatha Christie

4. "I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language."Author: Agatha Christie

6. "That Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me"Author: Alexandre Dumas

7. "I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since."Author: Anne Stevenson

8. "But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night."Author: Charles Dickens

9. "Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it... "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)"Author: Charles Dickens

10. "An Englishman will fairly drink as much As will maintain two families of Dutch."Author: Daniel Defoe

11. "An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time"Author: Diana Gabaldon

12. "And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's flfty-flve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "—he rode against him furiously— "and then," he concluded, half kissing him, "you and I shall be friends."Author: E.M. Forster

13. "... Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days --- the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals."Author: Emmuska Orczy

14. "...but in every century, and ever since England has been what it is, an Englishman has always felt somewhat ashamed of his own emotion and of his own sympathy."Author: Emmuska Orczy

15. "Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist."Author: Evelyn Waugh

16. "Old Campion had once said he believed - he positively believed, with shudders - that Christopher desired to live in the spirit of Christ. That had seemed horrible to the general, but Mark did not see that it was horrible, per se... He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as rule refuse their jobs... They had not used to; now no doubt they did."Author: Ford Madox Ford

17. "The Olympian vice.--In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'---Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter---right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion---and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing."Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty"Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19. "An Englishman, being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion."Author: George Chapman

20. "Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either."Author: George Mikes

21. "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one."Author: George Mikes

22. "Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone."Author: Germaine Greer

23. "Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once."Author: Henry David Thoreau

24. "Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested."Author: Hervey Allen

25. "If an Englishman gets run down by a truck he apologizes to the truck."Author: Jackie Mason

26. "The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure."Author: Jean Lorrain

27. "Listeners will wonder what an Englishman is doing on the German radio tonight. You can imagine that before taking this step I hoped that someone better qualified than me would come forward."Author: John Amery

28. "There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important."Author: John Boorman

29. "Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first."Author: Julian Barnes

30. "The liberty of the Press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman."Author: Junius

31. "The average Englishman has no idea of the dynamism in the music scene here."Author: Kabir Bedi

32. "Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"Author: Kurt Vonnegut

33. "The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the following vows to himself: To brush his teeth twice a day, to shave once a day, to wash his face and hands before every meal and after going to the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise for at least a half an hour each morning and then move his bowels, and to look into a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly with respect to his posture."Author: Kurt Vonnegut

34. "She gave him a dubious look, as if he wasn't quite right in the head. "Sometimes, Englishman, I do notunderstand you. I love you, but I do not always understand you."She turned and started across the meadow. He remained where he was and watched her walk away,with her skirts in her hand and the sun on her hair."I love you, too," he said, but only after she was too far away to hear. "I always have."Author: Laura Lee Guhrke

35. "A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully."Author: Leo Tolstoy

37. "American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit."Author: Michael Ondaatje

38. "By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half of my compatriots seemed to do."Author: Nick Hornby

39. "Like Keats he may wander through the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the galley's deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since passed away. But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social man, with man in his relation to God and to Humanity. It is the product of a period of great national united energy; it is impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of the Armada of Spain."Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "Second time you have made that observation. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman--always a rash thing to do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing"Author: Oscar Wilde

41. "When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country."Author: Oswald Spengler

42. "A second or two later, the reptile had been quite absorbed by a handsome, arrogant-looking Englishman smelling strongly of snobbery and snake."Author: P.B. Kerr

43. "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French."Author: P.G. Wodehouse

44. "It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul."Author: Paul Hoffman

45. "He learns that the form, in its current form, was originally called a formulary, and was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage, the same man who invented both an early kind of computer and the cow catcher, a device attached to the front of locomotives to clear debris from train tracks. He learns that Babbage once wrote to Alfred Tennyson to correct two lines from one of Tennyson's poems, which Babbage felt lacked scientific accuracy. This, thinks Jonas, tells you everything you need to know about both the man and the invention of forms."Author: Stephen Dau

46. "If "Manners maketh man," as someone saidThen he's the hero of the dayIt takes a man to suffer ignorance and smileBe yourself, no matter what they say."(Englishman in New York)"Author: Sting

47. "I love the sad songs with their maudlin, self-deprecating, almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman, they make a lot of sense."Author: Teddy Thompson

48. "New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is."Author: Theo James

49. "Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education."Author: Thomas Hughes